The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

by Brian Ladd

In the absence of a king, this fortunate combination of uses cannot be recovered, so what, exactly, would be rebuilt? The practical answer was that only the facade—and probably not all of that—would be reconstructed. The palace’s friends agreed that rebuilding the interior—the magnificent throne rooms and ballrooms—would be pointless as well as impossible, since there would be no use for them. But they did believe that the city center needed the palace facade to help heal wounds and to restore a coherent urban identity. Opponents countered that a palace facade would repress half a century of historical memory and create the illusion of a continuity and wholeness that had never existed: “Neither in a monumental nor in a political sense could a palace function today as the city’s crowning glory. For it would be—in the sense of its original purpose—empty. It would be an utterly misguided symbol for this state: an architectural lurch to the right and an enormous encouragement for restorative tendencies in society. It can be assumed that this is one of the palace lobby’s intentions.”19 This outburst came from a journalist writing for a respectable middle-of-the-road newspaper. Its imputation that the palace debate was really about right-wing politics should not surprise anyone who knows that deep philosophical and political divisions lurk just beneath the surface of German debates about form and identity, including debates about architectural form and urban identity. Many on th...